Mater artium necessitas

Archive for April, 2008

Business Week has a recent article where the author foresee the demise of Windows in favour of Apple’s OS.
Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking I was reading one of these overenthusiastic 1925 popular-science article promising us that within just a few years we would all use our own flying car to get to work.
Yeah, right, mine is parked right under my window.

The basic premise of the article is that Apple will attack the corporate market through the back-door, using the iPhone and its forthcoming development platform.
The author contend that development to the iPhone will drive interest in the Mac and allow Apple to displace Windows by offering more business-related applications that would eventually not require Microsoft’s OS running side-by-side in your Mac, freeing you of the dominance of the evil empire.
Please read the article first.
Done?
Hmmm…
Ok, let’s see…

First, let’s be nice: if Apple want to eat at Microsoft’s dominance of the OS market, then all the better: more competition will drive innovation and choice, which is always nice.
There is certainly some truth to the idea that Apple could offer some useful tools and technologies to the corporate world.

The problem is that author of the article was a bit too much of a Mc Fanboy(TM) to make his arguments compelling.

Let’s start direct quotes from the article.

Speaking of the ability of the Mac to quickly switch from a Windows application to a Mac by using a keyboard shortcut:

“Windows users, in the very near future, will be free to switch to Apple computers and mobile devices, drawn by a widening array of Mac software, without suffering the pain of giving up critical Windows-based applications right away.”

Useful as it may be, it’s forgetting one thing: if you need to be able to run your windows application under a Mac, you will need to give Microsoft money for the Windows license, making the newly found convenience of running the two OS together seamlessly a fairly expensive one, both in terms of computer resources and money.
While it will interest a lot of people and they may use their windows apps on Apple hardware is this really compelling enough to make it a viable migration path?

About the new Mac OS kernel:

“That kernel has proved easily adaptable across the entire Apple product line, from highly complex servers all the way down to the relatively simple iPod Touch. Such modularity allows Apple to add whatever functions are necessary for each product environment—all while maintaining cross-product compatibility.
By contrast, Microsoft has held on to an OS tethered to the 1980s, piling additions upon additions with each upgrade to Windows. With last year’s arrival of Vista, Windows has swollen to 1 billion bytes (a gigabyte) or more of software code. The “Mach” kernel of the Mac OS X, however, requires less than 1 million bytes (a megabyte) of data in its smallest configuration, expanding modestly with the sophistication of the application.”

All this is so silly and skewed that I wonder where to start.
First, kernel size is irrelevant: a basic kernel functionality does not make an operating system. Additionally, I doubt that we’re comparing the same functionality and for desktop or server applications this is utterly irrelevant.
For small devices Windows has its own flavours and they can quickly be deployed to almost any hardware with minimal effort.
Applications built for Windows built for mobile devices can be ported to Windows without too much trouble, and vice versa. Whatever platform you’re developing on, applications for small hardware are always an exercise in compromise: there is no way that you can just recompile an app for a different target and have it just work beautifully in any device. A mobile app must take care of power requirements, limited screen estate, memory and CPU limitations and specific usability issues like the presence of a touch-screen instead of a keyboard and mouse.
The point is that you have to take the platform into consideration when crafting software.
Besides, using .Net makes it fairly easy to develop applications for any flavour of Windows.
Additionally, whether the OS under the XBox is different or not from the desktop version of Windows is also irrelevant: you can develop games under the XNA platform that compile and work just the same under Windows as they do on the Xbox.

Now, for the argument regarding the “additions upon additions” made upon Windows that contribute to its bloat, it’s an easy shot to make and an unfair one: Apple has had no regards for its legacy applications and since its primary market was consumers, it could get away with making each of its major OS release incompatible with the previous one.
We can argue whether it was a good thing for Microsoft to keep all the quirks from previous releases of its operating system alive but we must not forget that in the corporate world, Windows has close to 100% market share on the desktop.
What that means is that Microsoft could not afford not supporting business applications across versions. it would have been suicidal to even envisage dropping compatibility.
If Apple ever get into that corporate market above a few percent it will have to guarantee compatibility between versions of its OS and programming tools if it wants to have any chance at being taken seriously at all.
When companies spend money developing an application that is critical to their business, they don’t want to hear about its supporting OS becoming incompatible every couple of years.
Apple would have to support and maintain compatibility for at least 10 years for every major OS version. So far Apple hasn’t shown that it was capable of that type of commitment.

A small digression.
A couple of weeks ago I found some old files of mine on a floppy.
They were Ami Pro files, made at a time when Ami Pro 3.1 was the best word processor around.
Problem was that I could not safely open these files any longer: filters for various word processors would mangle the complex layout of the pages, making them un-usable.
Out of curiosity, I found a full version of the original Amipro 3.1.
I had no expectations of being able to run that setup package. After all, Ami Pro 3.1 came out in 1994, before Windows 95 was even released!
Well, I clicked on that setup.exe file and watched the installation process go through…
Everything went fine.
Surely, I thought, there is no way this is going to run under Windows XP. It’s going to crash for sure.
I double-clicked on the 16 colour icon and lo and behold, the whole thing actually ran! Flawlessly!
I was able to open my old files without any issue, save them under another format.
Everything worked, miraculously.
That application was written at a time the Internet didn’t even exist yet I was able to install and run it without problem on a current operating system.
Back to our regular schedule.

“Despite Apple’s relative scarcity on corporate desktops, Mac laptops are already well accepted within the enterprise, with a market share of more than 20% and growing. For business travellers, the new MacBook Air, some three pounds lighter than comparable Windows-based laptops, already offers one huge advantage.”

First, Apple has a almost 20% market share on overall laptops sales only, not corporate sales.
Second, that figure is for the US only. Apple’s laptop market share in the world is certainly not bad, but it’s a quarter of that figure, making adoption of Apple laptops outside the US very small indeed.
Third, while Apple laptops are certainly sexy, they bring their own issues to businesses: lack of in-house serviceable parts, issues with making them fit into a complex infrastructure, hardware and software compatibility problems.
Bringing Macs into your organisation can be painful. Of course, it’s never impossible, but beyond simple setups, it takes time, energy and money to make stuff work seamlessly.
So I contend that, unless you have a serious commitment to Apple, most of the Macs getting into companies are for simple usage: fetching emails, browsing, making presentations and maybe Photoshop, although it seems that the application that was once the sole reason for some to use macs is now going to switch side, at least for a little while.
For Macs to become a first-class corporate platform would require that Apple makes a very serious commitment to cross-platform development to make applications work on Windows as well.
I seriously don’t think that the ability of Macs to run Windows side-by-side will do much: as mentioned above, the expense incurred offers no real benefit to businesses and having to support both platforms would increase the cost of ownership because of the upfront cost of buying and installing multiple OS, 15% higher average cost of Apple laptops compared to other similarly specified laptops and the cost of maintaining and supporting multiple hardware and OS stacks.
Slickness can only get you so far I suppose.

“While Mac desktops offer a growing number of superior features over Windows desktops”

Seriously dude, what superior features?

“Apple’s recently introduced Leopard servers compete in a market of unhappy Vista server buyers where Microsoft’s market share is only 40%. Leopard has a decent chance to expand from its small beachhead.”

Huh? Vista servers?
WTF is that?
You can’t be talking about Windows 2003 because it’s actually a rock-solid platform and there isn’t much to complain about.
Windows 2008 is just coming out and it looks just as promising.
Apple has some seriously nice server hardware, it’s so beautiful to look at all this engineering that it gets me all hot and bothered.
Seriously though, on the server side, Leopard would not be in competition with Windows but with *nix.
Server-side applications like ASP, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server and the myriad other Microsoft-only server software will only work on Windows.
Apple is not going to compete as a platform for hosting these which means it will host services traditionally found on Linux/Unix/BSD systems.
In that *nix camp Apple would certainly be a good contender, although it would have to prove that it can compete with the low license and hardware cost of its competitors and offer more.

One more thing to remember: Apple is in the hardware business: it uses software to lock people into its hardware business.
I’m all for competition but at least using Linux or Microsoft products doesn’t lock me into a single hardware/software platform pair: I have orders of magnitude more choices when it comes to my servers, desktops and laptops than what Apple can offer me.
Apple products may be slick and beautifully engineered but they certainly don’t offer more freedom: chose an iPhone and get stuck with a single network provider, buy an iPod and get stuck with iTune, buy a mac and get stuck with Apple, limited software offerings, no serious games and limited hardware support.

One other thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft has acquired a huge weight in terms of software development power: new technologies have been pouring out of Redmond at a pace that is impossible to follow.
The number of developers and companies able to develop software for Windows platforms is wayyy above what Apple can dream of at the moment (we’re talking about millions of developer making a living off Windows).
Apple will need to make serious efforts to woo the huge amounts of developers it needs to bring enough business and non-business applications to its platforms before it can become a serious competitor to Windows in the corporate world.
Whether Apple has the capacity and will to do that instead of remaining a consumer-oriented company remains to be seen.

That being said I wouldn’t mind developing software for Apple platforms. I would love to be able to use a generic “surface laptop”, a sort of larger iPhone that could be used by sales people for taking orders and showing off new products.

Anyway, the point of all this was simply to offer a modest reality-check to an article that should have been a bit more measured and balanced in its fanboy-ish enthusiasm.